Author: Kerstin Slany

Are you tired of estimating your energy consumption and not being able to track it in real-time? Then this blog post is for you. My master thesis VOLTA – the smart energy application will innovate the way you monitor your energy usage. VOLTA visually represents your real-time energy consumption, making it easier for you to understand and control your energy usage. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the research I’m currently in, the features and benefits of interactive data visualisation and how the thesis and especially the project Volta can help you become more energy efficient. Let’s go.

Why do I want to research in this topic?

Smart energy applications that visualise your own consumption behaviour can be incredibly useful for helping you better understand your energy use and identify opportunities to save money and help you to live more sustainable. By providing a clear and intuitive visual representation of your energy consumption, Volta can make it easier to track your progress and stay motivated to reduce your energy consumption.

What’s this all about?

In this blog post I want to kick-off my research with the topic of data visualisation, to share the insights I’ve already gained and to provide a starting point for discussion. So, let’s dive into the topic and get inspired.

Hello World of Data. The aim of data visualisation is to communicate information clearly and effectively through visuals. There are several different visualisation options that can be used to display your energy consumption data, and the best option will depend on your personal preferences and the goals you have for reducing your energy use. The visualisation is mostly done in geometries, which can be divided into different categories: they show quantities or comparisons, relationships or proportions or distributions, as well as compositions. In addition, data sets can be visualised in different ways, but say the same thing.

Some common visualisation options include:

• bar plot
• heatmaps
• traditional pie chart
• stacked density plots, mosaic plots, and treemaps
• box plot
• the histogram
• Violin plots and density plots
• popular scatterplot
• line geometries

Representing data graphically in the form of graphs, charts, and maps helps users quickly spot trends and assess the status of KPIs. Allowing direct interaction helps users dig deeper to identify patterns and find new relationships in their data. ¹

But ultimately, interactive data visualisation helps turn raw data into business insights and value for the users. Interactive data visualisation leads to better decision making, data accessibility, and user engagement. It boosts collaboration and knowledge sharing, user trust in data, frequent data engagement, and higher satisfaction with analytical tools. The modules of Data Visualisation are: Visual Literacy, Visual Analysis, Visualisations for Business (including Dashboard, Scorecard, Analytic Reports, Analysis), and Visualisations of Tomorrow. ²

With our understanding of interactive data visualisation established, let’s now discuss the benefits it offers:

The benefits of using interactive data visualisation include quicker decision-making due to the brain processing visual information faster than text, easier identification of correlations and connections, ability to spot emerging trends, and opportunities for fresh discussions and insights by telling a story with data. This method of presenting data can lead to better insights, improved business performance, and increase brand awareness by engaging the target audience. ³

What are the features of an interactive dashboard?

Interactive dashboards have features such as quick filters, drill down, chart zoom, hide cells and widgets. Quick filters allow users to easily change data without altering the dashboard for others. Drill down lets users see deeper layers of data. Chart zoom allows zooming in on a specific section of a chart to see detailed data. Hide cells lets users view only selected data. Widgets allow integrations between business intelligence software and other business software to import data automatically.⁴

By considering these criteria and choosing the right visualisation options regarding the user’s needs, Volta is a smart energy application that is both effective and enjoyable to use. Whether you are looking to save money on your energy bills or simply reduce your environmental impact, Volta will serve a well-structured dashboard screen with an interactive experience as a powerful tool to help you keep track & manage your energy consumption.

Should you have any inquiries or are keen on the subject, I welcome any questions or input on the topic and look forward to engaging in discussions with you.

Sources:

(1) Stephen R. Midway: Principles of Effective Data Visualization. In: Patterns: Perspective, 1,9 (2020), doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.100141

(2) Jagreet Kaur: Data Visualization: Real-Time Streaming Data Visualization| Advanced Guide, In www.xenonstack.com/blog/streaming-data-visualizations (zuletzt aufgerufen am: 31.01.2022)

(3) Bernardita Calzon: Take Advantage Of The Best Interactive & Effective Data Visualization Examples, In: The datapine Blog: Data Visualization, (2022), www.datapine.com/blog/best-data-visualizations/#benefits (zuletzt aufgerufen am: 31.01.2022)

(4) Andrew Conrad: What Is an Interactive Dashboard?, In: GetApp, Blog & research, (2022), www.getapp.com/resources/what-is-interactive-dashboard/ (zuletzt aufgerufen am: 31.01.2022)

Echtzeit. Daten. Haushalt. Die Schlagwörter für meine Masterarbeit stehen fest, jetzt ist die Frage, wie man sie gemeinsam verständlich unter einem Dach kombinieren kann.

Da der nächste Schritt die theoretische Recherche, sowie das Verstehen der technischen Umsetzung sein wird, hab ich bewusst eine Masterarbeit ausgewählt, die folgendes intensiv behandelt.

Masterarbeit von Micha Severin

“Konzeption und Realisierung einer Plattform zur Echtzeit-Netzwerkdatenanalyse” der Fakultät Technik und Informatik der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg, aus dem Jahr 2017

Gestaltung.

Da bei dieser Arbeit das Design nicht im Vordergrund steht, beinhaltet sie keine visuelle Umsetzung, dennoch ist die Arbeit schlicht, verständlich und ordentlich aufgebaut. Auffällig ist die bewusste Hervorhebung der Quellen durch rote Schriftfarbe.

Innovationsgrad.

Der Autor beschreibt in seiner Motivation, das Unternehmensentscheidungen immer mehr auf Datenverarbeitung und -analysen basieren. In einer immer digitaler werdenden Gesellschaft finde ich, vor allem hinsichtlich des Erscheinungsjahr von 2017, ist dies eine sehr innovative Thematik.

Selbstständigkeit & Gliederung und  Struktur.

Die Arbeit beinhaltet einen Autor und ist daher selbstständig verfasst, hinsichtlich Arbeitsweise habe ich allerdings keinen Einblick in den Entstehungsprozess. Durch die Arbeit selbst, zieht sich ein ersichtlicher roter Faden, und sie ist sehr strukturiert aufgebaut. Besonders hervorzuheben sind die Zusammenfassungen am Ende eines Kapitels, in dem der Autor seine Erkenntnisse kurz wiedergibt.

Kommunikationsgrad & Umfang der Arbeit.

Die Arbeit beinhaltet 123 Seiten, das Thema, sowie die Forschungsfrage sind klar und verständlich formuliert und durch einen strukturierten Aufbau der gesamten Arbeit kann man den Forschungsweg klar nachvollziehen, wodurch die Arbeit in Kommunikation und Umfang ordentlich ausgearbeitet ist.

Orthographie sowie Sorgfalt und Genauigkeit.

Sachlich und professionelle Formulierungen, sowie die Verwendung von Fachjargon spiegeln Professionalität und Sachlichkeit wieder. Die Arbeit wurde sorgfältig gelayouted, sowie auf Rechtschreibfehler überprüft, folglich sind keine Auffälligkeiten zu finden.

Literatur.

Sechs Seiten der Arbeit sind reines Literaturverzeichnis, welches representative Quellen aus der Informatikbranche aufweisen. Die angegebenen Zitationen mit Onlinezugang, sind ebenfalls von vertrauenswürdigen und professionellen Herausgeber:innen, wodurch die Arbeit einen thematischen und hochwertigen Content aufweist.

Every musical creation starts with an idea, which can be a phrase, a sound object or a rhythmic pattern. Musicians are inspired by the individual sounds, bringing compositions to life and playing around the idea by improvising and adding parts to increase complexity. In the context of songwriting sessions of music groups, new compositions are often created through improvisational interactions between the musicians – this is called jams.

Spire Muse is a co-creative agent that supports musical brainstorming. The following is a brief explanation of how it works.

During jam sessions, basic musical ideas emerge, and the more one subsequently interacts with this idea, the more diverse the musical form develops. Creative interaction during improvisation is therefore very important for the emergence of further ideas. In general, musical interaction is a strategy built up from iterative phases.

The more one interacts with the idea, the more diverse the musical form can change. To make an open-ended creative interaction possible, improvisation is very important. A musical interaction is a strategy built from iterative phases. This means that improvising musicians decide whether they want to change something in their sequences, which can either be an initiative (new) change or a reaction. Reaction categories are adoption, augmentation and contrast.

Feedback during improvisation is essential; if it is positive, it can reinforce certain ideas; if it is negative, it can extinguish the spark of an idea or lead to new ideas different from the previous one.

Creativity cannot be defined in a uniform way, but is a process of multiple interactions that trigger unpredictable and undefined results. Through emergence of human-computer interaction (HCI), as well as artificial intelligence (AI), the perception of creativity is changing. With the help of AI, there are two ways that have an impact on the creativity process. Systems that have a supportive effect on human intelligence, so-called “creativity support tools” or those that generate results that are classified as creative from the perspective of an unbiased observer. The symbiosis of human and computer-assisted idea generation or creative process is then a co-creativity.

We have focused on designing a co-creative system that realizes the concept of a virtual jam partner.

by Notto J. W. Thelle and Philippe Pasquier

Spire Muse focuses on creating such co-creativity through a virulent jam partner. The strategy behind this is that the human or computer components interact with each other.

In a human interaction, action and decision interact, so the human is often the decision maker, which a computer cannot be. To avoid a dominant side in a co-creation, interactive behaviors are analyzed and defined in 4 categories, which are classified based on Reactive and Procative properties.

• Shadowing – user follows what he does synchronously
• Mirroring – Information or musical content is mirrored back in a novel way.
• Coupling – system, can clearly take the lead
• Negotiation – attempts to achieve goal through output modification.

When switching between the three behaviors – Shadowing, Mirroring, Coupling – Negotiation occurs, either autonomously or by the user.

The Spire Muse agent was generated on MASOM (Musical Agent based on Self-Organising Maps) and in MAX.

The learning process of the agent starts in the 1st stage by slicing the audio data in the source folder (the corpus) and then labelling the individual audio slices with feature vectors. This results in 55 dimensions of melodic and harmonic data.

Duration, loudness, fundamental frequency and chroma are used to encode the harmonic dynamics.

The feature vectors are then mapped onto a selforganizing map (SOM), an artificial neural network that employs unsupervised learning, so that the feature vectors can be displayed in a two-dimensional topological grid. Then, the tempo for each song is derived from the Python script via OSC to match the original tempo of the music piece. The last training part focuses on creating one sequence per song, so that repetitions and interaction dynamics can be shown.

The four influence parameters are rhythmic, spectral, melodic and harmonic.

The influences can be adjusted with sliders, so any combination of relative influences is possible.

Interactive modes

• Shadow mode: Agent is reactive here. It plays the most appropriate audio slice in the corpus for each registered onset in the input.
• Mirroring Mode: agent is reflexive interaction, respond with similar phrases after prolonged listening to single phrases.
• Coupling Mode: song is automatically selected from the corpus and chosen with respect to two criteria:
  • Harmonic dynamics on the meso-time scale:.
  • Tempo similarity:
    

The program starts in Shadow mode, which is the initial mode, as well as the evasive mode. The program returns to this mode if the requirements for activating Mirror or Coupling Mode are not met.

In addition to the automated behaviors of the agent, there is also a button with the functions Back, Pause/Continue, Change and Thumbs Up.

Thumbs Up indicates to the system that the current interaction is good and then maintains the current state for the next 30 seconds. All keys are operated with foot pedals.

“Throwback” is supportive of call-and-response interactions, but can become unpredictable in some SOM regions. These interfaces allow manipulation of behaviors and provide sufficient room for automated operations.

→ Spire Muse is not intended to enhance the agent’s musical performance, but rather to get the user to create ideas with a sense of shared exploration.

→ Ultimately, we believe that the most promising feature of Spire Muse is not the agent’s musical performance per se, but rather its ability to get users to explore ideas with a sense of shared ownership.

Spine Muse is expected to learn more algorithms in the future to reduce unpredictability through repeated use. By observing multiple sessions, the agent should be able to generate a profile that recognizes behavior and thereby play out different responses based on the situation.

Personal Comment:

Encouraging creativity is always a great approach, just by engaging with this new interface artists can already break out of their usual environment and be inspired. Such systems can be very useful in artistic development, especially when there are blockages or lack of creativity. Nevertheless, as an artist, one should not only rely on digital systems, but also be able to and be inspired by analog.

I would find a stronger integration of human-human interaction very exciting, in order to bring more emotions into the generated ideas. Maybe an implementation of Jam-with-Friends-Feature would be a good approach to bring together several artists with computer support in different places and to create a kind of community.

Source: Spire Muse: A Virtual Musical Partner for Creative Brainstorming – by Notto J. W. Thelle and Philippe Pasquier (https://nime.pubpub.org/pub/wcj8sjee/release/1)